A little book on a great subject, especially when that book is one
of a "series," is notoriously an object of literary distrust. For
the limitations thus imposed upon the writer are such as few men can
satisfactorily cope with, and he must needs ask the indulgence of his
readers for his painfully felt shortcomings in dealing with the mass
of material which he has to manipulate. And more especially is this
the case when the volume which immediately precedes his in the series
is such a mine of erudition as the 'Celtic Britain' of Professor Rhys.

In the present work my object has been to give a readable sketch
of the historical growth and decay of Roman influence in Britain,
illustrated by the archaeology of the period, rather than a mainly
archaeological treatise with a bare outline of the history. The chief
authorities of which I have made use are thus those original classical
sources for the early history of our island, so carefully and ably
collected in the 'Monumenta Historica Britannica';[1] which, along
with Huebner's 'Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum[2],' must always be
the foundation of every work on Roman Britain. Amongst the many
other authorities consulted I must acknowledge my special debt to Mr.
Elton's 'Origins of English History'; and yet more to Mr. Haverfield's
invaluable publications in the 'Antiquary' and elsewhere, without
which to keep abreast of the incessant development of my subject by
the antiquarian spade work now going on all over the land would be an
almost hopeless task.

EDWARD CONYBEARE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A complete Bibliography of Roman Britain would be wholly beyond the
scope of the present work. Much of the most valuable material, indeed,
has never been published in book form, and must be sought out in the
articles of the 'Antiquary,' 'Hermes,' etc., and the reports of the
many local Archaeological Societies. All that is here attempted is to
indicate some of the more valuable of the many scores of sources to
which my pages are indebted.

To begin with the ancient authorities. These range through upwards of
a thousand years; from Herodotus in the 5th century before Christ, to
Gildas in the 6th century after. From about 100 A.D. onwards we find
that almost every known classical authority makes more or less mention
of Britain. A list of over a hundred such authors is given in the
'Monumenta Historica Britannica'; and upwards of fifty are quoted
in this present work. Historians, poets, geographers, naturalists,
statesmen, ecclesiastics, all give touches which help out our
delineation of Roman Britain.

Amongst the historians the most important are Caesar, who tells his
own tale; Tacitus, to whom we owe our main knowledge of the Conquest,
with the later stages of which he was contemporary; Dion Cassius, who
wrote his history in the next century, the 2nd A.D.;[3] the various
Imperial biographers of the 3rd century; the Imperial panegyrists of
the 4th, along with Ammianus Marcellinus, who towards the close of
that century connects and supplements their stories; Claudian, the
poet historian of the 5th century, whose verses throw a lurid gleam
on his own disastrous age, when Roman authority in Britain was at its
last gasp; and finally the British writers, Nennius and Gildas, whose
"monotonous plaint" shows that authority dead and gone, with the first
stirring of our new national life already quickening amid the decay... Continue reading book >>